Papers

"In a fit of optimism that usually does not characterize him, Gabriel
approached the Xerox Interlisp group, and received a warmer welcome than
he did in Berkeley, but he left with only an indication that someone,
probably Bill VanMelle, would attend the meetings, mostly as an
observer." [Steele
and Gabriel 1993]

C. Queinnec and J. Chailloux, editors. Proceedings of the First International Workshop
on Lisp Evolution and
Standardization.
February 22-23, 1988, Paris, France. Published by IOS, Amsterdam, 1988.

Takayasu Ito and Taiichi Yuasa. Some Non-standard Issues on Lisp
Standardization. Proceedings of the First
International Workshop on LISP Evolution and Standardization, February
22-23, 1988, Paris France, Published by IOS, Amsterdam, 1988, pages 11-20.
PDF

Larry Masinter. Common LISP Cleanup. Proceedings of the First
International Workshop on LISP Evolution and Standardization, February
22-23, 1988, Paris France, Published by IOS, Amsterdam, 1988, pages 21-24. Computer History Museum: gift of Larry Masinter, Lot X6058.2011.
PDF of preprint

Kent M. Pitman. Interactions in Lisp. Proceedings of the First
International Workshop on Lisp Evolution and Standardization, February
22-23, 1988, pages 45-49.
Online at
www.nhplace.com

"The last ten years have seen both a boom and and bust for the Lisp
language. From its inception in 1958 until its commercialization in
1980, Lisp was content to live a life of academic obscurity, servicing
the needs of Artificial Intelligence, theorem proving and symbolic
algebra researchers. In this role, Lisp could explore many new ideas and
quickly absorb new ideas from the programming language 'mainstream'.
However, when AI became a business, Lisp was drawn to the money like a
moth to the flame. Lisp quickly sought to become 'industrial strength',
and ANSI Common Lisp was the result. Unfortunately, 'industrial' quickly
became 'rust belt', as the newly standardized Common Lisp could not
quickly grow and adapt to the new, more "open" environment.

In Lisp's quest for industrial respect, it abandoned its traditional
customers. Symbolic algebra developers (e.g., Maple, Mathematica) forsook Lisp for the more portable and efficient C.
Logicians gave up Lisp for Prolog and ML. Vision researchers, seeking
the highest performance from parallel computers, dropped Lisp in favor
of C, Fortran (!) and various fringe parallel languages. AI companies
were forced to move their expert systems into C, C++, Ada and Cobol (!)
because of the large size, poor performance and poor integration of
Common Lisp systems. Academicians teaching undergraduates chose Scheme
and ML for their small size, portability and clean semantics."

dpANS1: The
working draft that became the first draft proposed American National
Standard. This document is no longer current, and is kept around for
historical purposes only.

dpANS2: The
second draft proposed American National Standard. See the file
Reviewer-Notes.text for further information.

dpANS3: An
X3J13 internal document. A letter ballot is presently being taken to
see if this will become the third draft proposed American National
Standard. Until the results of the letter ballot are tallied, this
document has no offical standard as a dpANS. This document contains
only editorial changes since dpANS2. See the files Reviewer-Notes.text,
Change-Summary.text, and Change-Log.text for details.

cleanup:
status, reports, and proposals from some of the older X3J13
meetings. (For historical purposes only. Most information is several
years out of date. This is not an authoritative source of
information.)

Wanda J. Orlikowski and JoAnne Yates. Genre Repertoire: Norms and Forms
for Work and Interaction. MIT Sloan School Working Paper #3671-94, Center
for Coordination Science Technical Report #166, March 1994.
Online at ccs.mit.edu

"Most of the work [designing Common Lisp] was carried out by E-mail
discussion. These dicussions were captured in file archives. One
research at the Sloan School at MIT has used these archives to study
computer-mail-based decision-making and interaction. [Steele
and Gabriel 1993]

Masayuki Ida. The History of Lisp Standardization during 1984 – 1990.
Proceedings of the 2002 International Lisp Conference, San Francisco,
California, October 2002.
PDF

"CLtL1 was the output of a hastily united group of MacLisp
successors, who felt InterLisp group was stronger than they were. They
did not dream of international matters or even of commercial interests.
Most of them thought it is just a US academic research matter: most of
them did not know how to make international standards, or even American
national standards."

Implementations - open source

BBN Butterfly Common Lisp

CMU Common Lisp (CMUCL)

"CMUCL was developed at the Computer Science Department of Carnegie
Mellon University. The work was a small autonomous part within the Mach
microkernel-based operating system project, and started more as a tool
development effort than a research project. The project started out as Spice
Lisp, which provided a modern Lisp implementation for use in the CMU
community. CMUCL has been under continual development since the early 1980's
(concurrent with the Common Lisp standardization effort). Most of the CMU
Common Lisp implementors went on to work on the Gwydion environment for
Dylan. The CMU team was lead by Scott E. Fahlman, the Python compiler was
written by Robert MacLachlan." [CMUCL
credits]

GNU CLISP

"CLISP is a Common Lisp implementation by Bruno Haible, then of Karlsruhe
University, and Michael Stoll, then of Munich University, both in Germany.
It supports the Lisp described in the ANSI Common Lisp standard plus many
extensions.

CMUCL's CLOS implementation is derived from the PCL reference
implementation written at Xerox PARC. Its implementation of the LOOP macro
was derived from code from Symbolics, which was derived from code written at
MIT. The CLX code is copyrighted by Texas Instruments Incorporated. " [CLISP
Common Lisp Summary]

Kyoto Common Lisp (KCL)

"A new player from Japan – Kyoto Common Lisp (KCL) – provided a bit of a
spoiler: KCL has a compiler that compiles to C, which is compiled by the C
compiler. This Lisp was licensed essentially for free, and the Common Lisp
companies suddenly had a suprising competitor." [Steele and Gabriel 1993]

"Kyoto Common Lisp (KCL) is a highly portable and implementation of
Common Lisp originally developed at Kyoto University in Japan. KCL conforms
to CLtL1."

Austin Kyoto Common Lisp (AKCL)

"Austin Kyoto Common Lisp (AKCL) is a collection of ports, bug fixes and
improvements to KCL written by Bill Schelter. {A}KCL generates C code which
it compiles with the local C compiler."

"To build AKCL, one must also have in place the sources for KCL. At the
time one builds AKCL, one
automatically merges AKCL changes with the KCL sources, which are left
unmodified, in accordance with the KCL license."

GNU Common Lisp (GCL)

"GCL is the product of many hands over many years. The original effort
was known as the Kyoto Common Lisp system, written by Taiichi Yuasa and
Masami Hagiya in 1984. In 1987 new work was begun by William Schelter, and
that version of the system was called AKCL (Austin Kyoto Common Lisp). In
1994 AKCL was released as GCL (GNU Common Lisp) under the GNU public library
license. The primary purpose of GCL during that phase of its existence was
to support the Maxima computer algebra system, also maintained by Dr. Schelter. It existed largely as a subproject of Maxima.

After the passing of Dr. Schelter in 2001, it was decided that GCL should be
actively maintained and improved. GCL is currently maintained by a team of
12 developers across the world coordinated via the gcl-devel mailing list."
[GCL History]

Rutgers Common Lisp for TOPS-20 on DECSYSTEM-20

Charles L. Hedrick and J. Storrs (Josh) Hall developed a Common Lisp for the DECSYSTEM-20 running
TOPS-20 at Rutgers University during 1983-1985. This system was based on
Carnegie-Mellon's Spice Lisp, but used an assembly language kernel whose
"interior design is sort of a cross between the Spice machine and Elisp, the
Rutgers extended-addressing version of UCI Lisp" [Hedrick 1985]. The Spice
system code, which is the portion of the runtime written in Lisp, was used
with only minor modifications to deal with representation dependencies. The
Spice compiler was modified to generate code for the DECSYSTEM-20.

The version of the kernel and Lisp code exhibited here contains bug fixes
and improvements by Björn Victor, Per-Erik Martin and others at Uppsala
University, Sweden, and also by Peter Samson at Systems Concepts, San
Francisco, California.

The Flavors code was adapted for Common Lisp from Spice Lisp Flavors by
Torbjörn Åhs and Björn Victor at Uppsala University. Spice Lisp Flavors was
adapted by Steven Handerson from Symbolics Flavors. Symbolics Flavors
was designed by Howard Cannon and David Moon. [Cannon 1979] [Weinreb and Moon
1980] [Moon and Weinreb 1985] [Moon 1986]

clisp.tps.gz was processed
by uncompressing it with gzip, then running split_tap < clisp.tps,
which produced three output files, and finally running read20 -C
-f out02.dat -x to process the actual TOPS-20 saveset.

"This document is adapted from text written primarily by David Moon
and Daniel Weinreb which appeared in the Lisp Machine Manual, fourth
edition, chapter 20, copyrighted by the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology."

Implementations - commercial

"Following CDC ALISP lineage for a moment, ALISP [at University of Massachusetts Amherst] was eventually replaced with work on a native Common Lisp that was headed by Richard Hudson." [Dan Corkill, personal communication, September 4, 2010]

"The Lisp/VE team was led by Richard L. Hudson and consisted of David M. Hart, Susan E. Lander, Andy Podgurski, Mali Anand, and Joanne Pommers. the compiler and runtime was written by the Lisp/VE team primarily in Lisp and a language called Cybil (Cyber Implementation Language). It leveraged a lot of the CMU Spice Lisp code to implement many of the Common Lisp functions and libraries. It faithfully implements the Common Lisp dialect and was available commercially as part of CDC's Cyber 180, the last machine CDC built." [Richard L. Hudson, personal communication, September 10, 2012]

"I think it was also the first full implementation of Pitman's condition system (I recall Susan exchanging a lot of question/clarification emails with Kent during that time.)" [Dan Corkill, personal communication, September 10, 2012]

Documentation

Applications

Computer algebra

"Axiom has been in development since 1971. At that time, it was called Scratchpad. Scratchpad was a large, general purpose computer algebra system that was originally developed by IBM under the direction of Richard Jenks. The project started in 1971 and evolved slowly. Barry Trager was key to the technical direction of the project. Scratchpad developed over a 20 year stretch and was basically considered as a research platform for developing new ideas in computational mathematics. In the 1990s, as IBM's fortunes slid, the Scratchpad project was renamed to Axiom, sold to the Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) in England and became a commercial system. As part of the Scratchpad project at IBM in Yorktown Tim Daly worked on all aspects of the system and eventually helped transfer the product to NAG. For a variety of reasons it never became a financial success and NAG withdrew it from the market in October, 2001.

NAG agreed to release Axiom as free software. The basic motivation was that Axiom represents something different from other programs in a lot of ways. Primarily because of its foundation in mathematics the Axiom system will potentially be useful 30 years from now. In its current state it represents about 30 years and 300 man-years of research work. To strive to keep such a large collection of knowledge alive seems a worthwhile goal."

"Maxima is a descendant of DOE Macsyma, which
had its origins in the late 1960s at MIT. It is the only system based on
that effort still publicly available and with an active user community,
thanks to its open source nature. Macsyma was the first of a new breed of
computer algebra systems, leading the way for programs such as Maple and
Mathematica. This particular variant of Macsyma was maintained by William
Schelter from 1982 until he passed away in 2001. In 1998 he obtained
permission to release the source code under GPL. It was his efforts and
skill which have made the survival of Maxima possible, and we are very
grateful to him for volunteering his time and skill to keep the original
Macsyma code alive and well. Since his passing a group of users and
developers has formed to keep Maxima alive and kicking. Maxima itself is
reasonably feature complete at this stage, with abilities such as symbolic
integration, 3D plotting, and an ODE solver, but there is a lot of work yet
to be done in terms of bug fixing, cleanup, and documentation. This is not
to say there will be no new features, but there is much work to be done
before that stage will be reached, and for now new features are not likely
to be our focus." [About Maxima]

Theorem provers

The Boyer-Moore theorem prover pioneered the approach (also used by ACL2) of
using "home-grown dialect of Pure Lisp" as a logic language, and also uses a
regular Lisp as an implementation language.